Oro Valley

Hospitals - with their life-support systems, miles of medical gas piping and complex mechanical systems - are among the most complicated buildings to construct.

Toss in an extremely tight construction schedule, and the job becomes even more interesting.

That's the case in Oro Valley, Ariz., where the Nashville office of Bovis Lend Lease is building a new, state-of-the-art 243,000-sq.-ft. hospital in just 16 months. Contractors on the $85 million construction-manager-at-risk project are aiming for a November completion. The owner is Triad Hospitals of Plano, Texas.

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"It's just a really fast-paced project," said Brian Frazier, a project engineer with site utility contractor Granite Construction of Watsonville, Calif. "Those guys from Bovis are throwing that building up at a phenomenal pace."

Work on the 35-acre site started in July, with contractors over-excavating 12 ft. of poor soil from the building's footprint. Contractors removed more than 80,000 cu. yds of sandy soils and then imported engineered fill to construct a solid base.

"The biggest hurdle was getting the building pad prepared," said Bovis Lend Lease Project manager Jason Adams.

Crews are also roughing in utilities for a future expansion to meet the growing demands of Oro Valley, a booming community north of Tucson. Tentative plans call for a second patient tower when the need arises.

"We thought a lot about immediate, incremental expansion, as well as out in the future, for another patient tower," said Linda Marzialo, a resident architect with Charlottesville, Va.-based project designer Gould Turner Group. "It was a very important part of the building's design to plan for a future expansion."

Sitting on a 124,000-sq.-ft. first- floor pad, the four-story, steel-framed building is topped off with a mechanical penthouse. Designers barely slipped under Oro Valley's 75-ft. maximum height allowance with a 74-ft., 10-in. building height. The three other floors average 35,000 -sq. ft. on each plate.

Plans call for 96 hospital beds on the second and third floors. The private rooms are 330- sq. ft. each. There will be 18 beds for critical care, 30 beds with telemetry monitoring, 18 rehabilitation beds and 30 general patient beds.

The first floor consists of six operating rooms, four endoscope rooms, a cath lab, MRI room, a CT room, space for nuclear medicine and three X-ray rooms, including one dedicated to the emergency room. The fourth floor is shell space for future expansion.

Engineers designed special ceiling mounts for 1,000-lb. surgical booms in the six operating suites. The mounts for the 1,000 lb. booms must be able to take a 7,000-lb. structural moment.

"There used to be hose outlets and electrical connections in the ceiling or the walls, but now they are using these articulated booms," said David Ringenberg, a senior project manager with Ivey Mechanical of Nashville. "The boom gives the surgeons and the anesthesiologists a lot more flexibility, and the booms also provide the nitrogen that runs the pneumatic equipment."

The operating rooms also feature a laminar airflow system that creates a horizontal airflow to lessen the risk of pathogens.

The project is packed with state-of-the-art technology. The computer systems are all wireless and the mechanical systems can be remotely monitored and controlled from owner Triad Hospitals' Texas office. All patient monitoring is also wireless, and a pneumatic tube system serves nurses' stations from the lab and pharmacy. Designers spent $11 million on the mechanical and controls package.

"It's a pretty high-tech controls package and it was very expensive," Adams said. "It's the Cadillac of control systems."

The hospital is designed to the specifications of the new International Building Code, which placed the project site in a seismic zone 4, the second- highest seismic rating.
Engineers designed special- moment frames to meet the new requirements. The steel frames are designed to channel the force of a seismic event on a horizontal plane, isolating the force, rather than vertically on the columns.

"Essentially they call it a 'dog bone' because the beam has a portion of the flange cut out, so it looks like a dog bone," said structural engineer Mark Hilner, an associate with Nashville-based Stanley D. Lindsey and Associates. "It forces any seismic damage into the beam rather than into the columns, where it could do damage to multiple floors.

"We are creating a zone where we can control what happens to the building in a large seismic event."

Crews from Little Rock, Ark.-based AFCO Steel erected more than 1,600 tons of the project's steel frame in just 12 weeks and supplied another 345 tons of metal pan deck for the hospital's floor systems. Glenn Van Enk directed the work for AFCO.
Structural Detailing LLC of Brentwood, Tenn., did the steel detail work.

"We were new to the International Building Code, so we had to do some different things with the steel than we normally do," said Brian Cobb, Structural Detailing's operations manager.

Phoenix-based Hardrock Concrete is pouring more than 7,000 cu. yds. of concrete but will wait to pour the first floor's concrete slab. Pouring the entire slab in one shot, rather than pouring the slab and leaving the steel columns open for later closure creates flatter floors, said Hardrock project manager Kevin McGrew.

"The good thing is you don't have huge closure pours on the column, because when you have a monster closure pour, it makes it harder to get a flat floor." he added. The building is mostly clad in EFIS, but Cox Masonry of Tucson is using 15,000 units of natural, dry-stack stone veneer for architectural accents. Way finding starts at the hospital entrance, with three different porte-cocheres marking the emergency entrance, ambulance entrance and visitor's entrance.

The project features high-end finishes throughout, with porcelain tiling and an art budget that is 1 percent of construction cost. The exterior EFIS system is three tones of a tan earth color and the curtain wall systems use a low E, blue-tinted glass to mimic Arizona's blue sky.

"In terms of the exterior aesthetics, we tried to blend the hospital in with the community and the natural landscape," architect Marzialo said. "We oriented the building to take advantage of the views of the adjacent Catalina Mountains, so the patients have a good view."

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